pick up the pieces
by krakens
Summary: Thirty hours after the Genoa report airs, Sloan and Don make a coffee run.


After the emergency middle-of-the-night board meeting, there's an emergency middle-of-the-night flurry of activity. Sloan's busy, and he is too, so it's not altogether weird that he doesn't see her for a couple hours after that. He almost forgets about her outburst completely, because he's running on almost no sleep and a _lot _of adrenaline, but then he sees her slipping out of her office, bag over her shoulder, looking battle-worn. He checks his watch. It's pushing four in the morning.

He watches her as she heads down the stairs and by the time he's determined that she's probably leaving the office for the night he's already halfway across the bullpen in her direction. She sees him coming and her gaze skips over him, but not in the cool practiced way he thinks she was probably going for.

"Hey," he says, trying to catch her attention as she passes. She keeps walking and he begins to follow, but she stops and turns on her heel so sharply that he nearly runs right into her.

"I haven't gotten a good night's sleep since Thursday," she says, taking a deep deliberate breath mid-sentence. "And it's the middle of the night, and there are about a million things that still need doing, and I can't deal with you being mad at me right now, Don. I just can't. I don't have the bandwidth." She turns and starts walking again, waving her hand as she goes. "You can chew me out tomorrow if you want," she promises in a mumbled aside he barely catches.

Because he also hasn't gotten a good night's sleep since Thursday, it takes him a second to catch up.

"I'm not mad at you," he says as he follows her towards the elevators. She tosses him a sidelong glance as he matches her stride. "I'm just… taking your temperature."

"Why?"

"Because it seemed to me like _you_ might actually be mad at _me._"

She lets out a strangled sigh and stops by the elevator, leaning against the wall without pressing the button. "I'm not. I'm just…"

"Taking responsibility," he says. She stares at him, just a little bit slack jawed. Her lips are barely parted. "You said _we _ditched out of the interview."

"General we," she tries, pointing around aimlessly for a moment before landing on the ACN logo at the end of the hall. He raises his eyebrows and she tears her gaze away from his, staring over his shoulder. Her mouth hangs open in a soft circle now as she heaves another deeper sigh, leaning against the wall again, arms folded behind her back.

"You know you're not—"

"I was in the control room," she says. She says it more like it's a clandestine admission than a statement of fact, and he can't help but stare at her for a second before he responds.

"So?"

"I was in the control room, and I was distracting you—"

"Come _on_."

"—distracting you while you had a guest live on the air."

"That's bullshit and you know it."

Her eyebrows shoot up and her face twists into a delicate expression of skepticism. "So I'm not a distraction."

"I—" he chokes out, unable to think of a single response that wouldn't be hugely incriminating. He jams his hands into his pockets and looks back towards the bullpen, where everyone is still wrapped up in their own personal spheres of damage control. "I can multitask, Sloan. It's basically my job."

"But if I hadn't been distracting you—"

"Seriously, come on."

"Stop interrupting me. If I hadn't been there you'd've been listening to what Sweeney was saying and gotten Elliot to get him back on track sooner, and then he wouldn't have mentioned…" This is apparently as far as she'd thought that speech through, because she looks confused and lost all of a sudden and she just gives up. It's uncharacteristic of her, shooting from the hip, throwing in the towel. But it's been a long weekend for everyone.

"Then we'd be sitting on a time bomb. It would've come out eventually."

"Not live. Not like that."

"Maybe not." They lapse into silence. Sloan still hasn't called the elevator. "But it wasn't your fault _or _your responsibility, so."

"Still." She shifts in place, uncrossing her arms from behind her back. "Normally, I wouldn't have even…" She brushes her hair out of her face, pressing her palms to her temples for a moment. "I was anxious, and I didn't want to be by myself, so I was there even though I knew I shouldn't've been, and that was selfish."

"I was stressed out too, you know."

"I know. That's what I'm saying. I shouldn't have—"

"I'm glad you did," he says, even though she asked him not to interrupt. "I like having you around." The second half of her sentence visibly dies on her lips as she stares at him. Someday, he thinks, he might strike the chord between too vague and not vague enough. She doesn't seem to have a rejoinder, so he clears his throat and continues. "Are you heading home?"

"No," she says, hitting the call button. The elevator dings immediately. "Coffee run. Starbucks opens in ten minutes." She steps into the elevator and looks at him, issuing a silent invitation with a quirk of her head and a lift of her eyebrows. He follows without putting any thought to it and soon they're walking down the street. Around them is the usual leisurely bustle of the city in the middle of the night, an entirely different world from the hectic bluster of the office.

"I should apologize to Elliot," she says as they cross a street. "For snapping at him in front of everyone."

"I don't think he's mad at you," Don says.

"Still."

"We're all on the same team," he says. She purses her lips.

"I know."

They walk in silence the rest of the way.

The barista at Starbucks recognizes Sloan but doesn't say where from. She doesn't follow up and plays it off like it's not a big deal – she informs him in a sardonic aside that she's finally coming to terms with her stardom – but she pulls her hood up and hides behind the bill of her baseball cap as they wait for their order, hunched up to make herself seem nondescript and small.

On the walk back, she chats idly about some indie film premiere she's planning on attending. When her gaze flicks up to the ACN building looming in the distance, she purses her lips and glances at her feet.

"What do you think is going to happen tomorrow?" she asks.

"Well," he says. "I strongly believe that together Will, Mac, and Charlie are capable of accomplishing nearly anything, so they'll either fix everything or become a subversive vigilante team of—"

"Awful," she says before he can even get the wisecrack out, but she also smiles.

"I know," he says. "I'm _really _tired, I can't work in this condition." She chuckles and shakes her head.

"Really, though."

"They'll fix it," he says, wishing he believed himself. Sloan clearly doesn't. She slackens her pace as they approach the ACN building. "Hey," he says. "We did our jobs. They can do theirs."

She's all but slowed to a stop, meandering along the sidewalk, coffee clutched between her hands. When her response comes, it is faint. "Did we, though?"

"Did we…?"

"Do our jobs," Sloan says. "You, me, Jim. They brought us in to be the Red Team, and none of us, not _one _of us felt right about it."

"Hey," he says again.

"Tell me I'm wrong," she challenges, and for someone who professes to being wrong most of the time she sounds pretty sure of herself. "Tell me that you haven't been feeling weird about this since they decided to run it. Tell me you didn't get that feeling in the pit of your stomach that you get when you _know _you're doing something wrong."

He doesn't say anything.

"Yeah."

"You're just anxious about the _absolutely_," he says.

"Maybe," she says. "But it doesn't feel like that's what it is."

(Hindsight's twenty-twenty, but he really does think that was the second he felt everything really irreparably fall apart.)

"Maybe you should go home and get some sleep," he suggests. She gives him a withering glance. "The mess will still be here tomorrow morning," he says. "You might as well try."

"I could say the same to you," she points out. "Are you going to go home?"

"No," he says. "I have to be—"

"Yeah," she says. "I'm staying." There's a beat in the conversation. "With you," she adds, squelching the vagueries.

He doesn't comment on it, though, and as they walk back to the office the space and silence between them seems more comfortable than before. After all, there's nothing left that needs to be said aloud and plenty of work to do.


End file.
